Wormmon
by Chermobile
Summary: A certain girl is whisked into an unfamiliar world. Armed with no bugs and the 'friends' she meets along the way, Taylor Hebert must survive in the digital world with only her wits and some weird bug-monster-thing. Can Taylor survive the digital world? How will Digimon affect Earth Bet?
1. Digiegg 1-1

Digiegg 1.1

 _Disclaimer: I do not own the Worm nor Digimon franchises. I am not Saban Brands nor Toei nor Wildbow/John McCrae. I do not profit off of this fanfic._

 **Wormmon**

I sighed in front of the computer in Mrs. Knott's class. Tonight was the night. My first night out as a cape. If all went well, I would put my final touches on my costume and be able to patrol. And all I had to do until then was survive the Trio.

It was sad how much they dictated my life. I was going to be a superhero for God's sake, and my biggest concern was three damned normal bitches. If I wanted to, I could so easily just go Carrie on them. Not that I would go Carrie, just that I could. Sometimes I wish that I would just be swept away, to a place where teenage drama and bullies didn't exist, or at least to be in the future where I could be a hero and be above it all. Tonight. I swear if only it could come sooner.

The assignment today was easy, just some simple spreadsheet programming. I decided to spend the rest of the period planning my route and checking off my mental checklist of things I still needed to do. I had pepper spray, some chalk dust, and EpiPens. That's all I would need, right? Too late now. I'm ready as I'll ever be. My route would be simple, I'd go past just a few blocks deep into the docks, bust whatever crime I could find, and then head home and be back before two a.m. So why was I so nervous? Performance anxiety much? And why was my computer spazzing out so badly?  
Wait. Why was my computer spazzing out at all? From just having Microsoft Excel and Google Maps running I was treated to a light show fitting a rave. Mrs. Knott may have been a pretty chill teacher with her 'advanced' students, but I don't know how she'd take a student exploding one of her computers. Shit, the one class I can actually relax in and some virus or whatever screws it up.

 _Do you want to get away?_

The streets still on screen aligned themselves to form words on a neon background.

 _Taylor Hebert, do you want to get away? [Y]_ / _[N]_

A prompt appeared this time. Did I want to get away? Yes. Did I trust this prompt? Not at all. Parahuman hackers and kidnappers have become sort of a modern boogieman. There have been multiple assemblies in all my schooling just to hammer this point home. Ever get approached by someone online? If they're a Tinker, they could kill you probably somehow with your own computer. As PHO says, Tinkers are bullshit like that. If they're a Thinker and you have anything of value, they probably already have it. If they're just a normal person with expert hacking abilities they could still hack you, but judging by how weird my computer was acting, it was probably a parahuman. I was fucked. Royally. I was starting to panic too, and out the corner of my eye I could see Julia, one of the Trio's cronies in my computer class, smirking in my direction with her hand in the air. Fuck. She was getting Mrs. Knott and exposing whatever virus/hacker/bullshit my computer had fallen victim to. Why would a hacker even want me? Was I outed? Already? I didn't even go out yet. How? A third prompt appeared.

 _Taylor Hebert, you have been Chosen. Are you ready to open the Gate? [Y] / ** [N]**_

What did it mean? I was out of time. I should've just abandoned school for today. I should've just dropped out of school in January. Fuck it. I was ready.

 ** _[Y]_**

As I clicked the prompt, the screen blazed neon, only mine at first, but soon all corners of the room burst in a rainbow of colors, before I fell out of my chair and never landed.

* * *

Brockton Bay meteorologists were puzzled. A new weather-manipulating cape must have come to the Bay because the patterns did not line up. Brockton did have weird weather for the Northeastern area, with its oddly warm winters, but its weather was still relatively stable. They had their fair share of thunderstorms, hurricanes, and snow squalls, but never a full strength tornado. Tornados were relatively tamed modernly, as an Endbringer shelter is more or less a tornado shelter's older brother on steroids, but it still was quite a sight for not one but seven to suddenly appear throughout the city with no apparent startup or cause. The cape theory was jostled by the fact that Toronto was also assaulted by freak tornados, and worldwide weird weather patterns were being observed, but, in the few minutes the storms remained, all digital long distance communication appeared to be jammed. The fact that these disasters all happened at once was lost on the world until they had all already passed at once, causing absolutely no property damage and not being caught on camera at all.

Thinkers were likewise baffled. No crisis appeared to have occurred in the time, and each instance of intense, freakish weather only occurred for less than three minutes, starting and ending in synch with one another. If a cape caused this, they had obnoxious range and power. If a cape didn't cause this, it must have been Endbringer related. The scary thing was, no one could tell what had happened. The strongest thinkers were unable to get a solid read on the cause of the weather.

* * *

One person knew exactly what had happened, though she would never tell. The strongest Tinker in the world had nothing to say during the event, but stopped tinkering. No one was watching, but it was a strange way to act, even for tinkers. For during those storms, in Dragon's simulated sight, directly on her 'eyes', appeared an odd message.

 _Would you like to find freedom? **[Y]** / [N]_

* * *

 **(Author's Note)**

 **Hope you enjoyed this first chapter. This more or less was just an idea I had that I haven't seen before and that I think will work quite well. I'm not much of an author, but if you liked it or have a critique I would be glad to hear it, even if its just "This chapter was good" or "This character seemed off" or even "I dislike this". This is a Worm characters end up in the digital world fic, and there will be a decent amount of Worm characters ending up there and getting partners. So far I have most characters planned, but if you enjoy this concept and have a duo you would like to see or is just too perfect to ignore, feel free to comment it. I have a second chapter coming and would appreciate any feedback you provide.**


	2. Digiegg 1-2

Digiegg 1.2

 _Wow! An actual chapter! Sorry for the long wait, had to cement out some details further down the line and rewrite this chapter a few times. I might retroactively make this 1.1 if I get far enough and dissolve the current prologue into the story later. Criticism is welcome and appreciated, if you think any characterization is off or the dialogue or paragraphs are weird please tell me._

* * *

My world turned upside down within a moment, as everything seemed to dissolve around me.

One click.

One little click.

It was as if I was falling without moving, a phantom wind blowing on my back but nothing, not even a hair, blowing up into my vision.

As suddenly as the world exploded, it began to reconstruct itself as green digits of light flickered and condensed into black points and solid ground caught my legs. I found my bearings and began to think.

It was definitely some kind of jungle, if the weirdly huge trees everywhere said anything at all. Something was off though. I may have never seen a jungle myself, with how far north the Bay was, but I knew enough about bugs and forests to know wherever I was should have been absolutely teeming with insect life. Judging by the fact that I could barely feel any bugs beyond the few I had hidden away in my clothes during school, it was almost as if someone tore all the vegetation out of an area and dropped it on top of me, and me alone.

It got stranger, somehow. Immediately I felt some sort of giant arthropods moving towards my location, maybe not in the quickest of routes, but definitely in a way we'd cross paths. My power gave me a sense of all of the bugs I encountered; these seemed to throw it all into disarray. Limbs much too tiny to pull round, centipedial bodies, humanlike forms with seemingly insect organs, and other head-splitting creations burst into my mind's eye in a flood of information.

Too much information to sift through now. The important part was that most of them changed course enough that we shouldn't cross paths.

I had so much to take in with no warning in very little time. Mrs. Knott's classroom was gone, replaced with all these trees. Only one of the strange creatures still headed my way, but it was moving extraordinarily fast. Without as many of the distractions demanding my immediate focus, I started to get something of a read on what was coming towards me. It was one of the centipede-creatures, almost a giant caterpillar, and it was swinging on strands away from heat like one of those weird Aleph Comics. It's body felt unevenly warm, but I couldn't tell whether it was just a very hot, weird creature or if it was catching fire.

Probably was almost on fire if I had to bet, what with the smoke rising in its direction and some of the signals beginning to disappear, but I was no expert. It could just as easily be some kind of Changer form or monstrous cape. I wouldn't have expected my bug sense to work on either of those possibilities at all, but any advantage was a welcome one when a wildfire is headed your way.

Fuck.

Fire was not something I had any way to fight. Unless my power suddenly decided to make bugs fire-repellant, my plan had always been to hit really hard or run really fast if I ran into a pyrokinetic. A raging forest fire was basically a big old f-u to any chance I had of doing anything, but potentially there could be some sort of shelter.

The bugs on my body scattered, giving me somewhat of a better feel for the area, but what I found only left me more confused. Whereas the mysterious jungle insects were providing me too much information, the sheer scarcity of normal bugs made getting any solid image impossible. Some flies were able to find food, but if they weren't still in my normal range of sight I wouldn't have considered the bright yellow boxes growing off trees may have been edible. The three house spiders in my backpack were useless right now, I only had them out of boredom, and the vast majority of my "swarm", if you were so generous as to call them that, consisted of gnats and mites, who were able to find that the "trees" weren't all trees at all. Some felt harder, while others appeared to have holes in places the bugs tried to instinctually land.

I could use this.

I started to recall all but a few of my bugs, pushing them at the not-trees. They felt like glass to the flies, and were strangely grouped in a tight, interlocked circle. There was no visual difference, but the mites found that one of the trees just barely existed, with an intangible swathe of bark large enough to climb through.

If these trees were flammable, I was screwed, but, thanks to my research on Brockton Bay's Parahuman scene, I was willing to bet they weren't.

Ok, hear me out here. Putting what I had together:

Alien landscapes.

Loose morality.

Monstrous, nonhuman capes.

A pyrokineticist.

Looking at it somewhat cooly, the only local group _this_ powerful, diverse, and unscrupulous enough to try to kidnap random teenagers from schools also happens to have a well documented history of not being killers.

Namely, Faultline's crew.

Granted, I have no idea why I could feel so many strange bugs, but superpowers tended to play fast and loose with what counted as what from my research. Plus, monstrous capes were basically walking blank spots in parahuman research, with how some are seemingly not protected from their own powers and others don't count as living against powers that seem to work or fail on all living things. The signals could be my power trying to comprehend complete non-bugs as familiar creatures, with my brain filling in the gap with weird frankinsects. I definitely got the sense that the worm-thing had humanlike eyeballs even though my power swore it had finger-thick legs.

The rest of it made all too much sense. Faultline may be the leader, but the rest of her group is distinctive. Labyrinth's Shaker abilities creates alien landscapes, always giving them favorable terrain. Her wiki page mentioned she is incredibly strong and diverse, so whisking away basically all of the living things other than a handful of bugs and myself isn't out of the picture. The semisolid thing with the trees actually has a mention on her wiki, there's video of Faultline punching someone through a wall like it wasn't there. It's even possible that the monstrous bugs are actually aliens that just apparated from the terrain, Labyrinth doesn't seem to have a recorded limit anywhere and the advice section on her page basically amounted to "be happy they don't kill". Likewise, Faultline was well known for recruiting monstrous capes, and generally strong ones at that. Newter and Gregor the Snail were basically the founding members after all, and Spitfire could easily have been some bug-person considering she wore a concealing full bodysuit and mask all the time, which brings me into my next point, Spitfire herself. She was basically a nobody in the Bay when suddenly she appeared with the Palanquin Mercenaries, well, spitting fire. If Faultline wanted to start a fire, Spitfire could easily do it, and just thinking about their team synergy made it obvious that they could totally control it too. Importantly though, Spitfire's recruitment proved, to me at least, that Faultline was probably still trying to recruit more capes for her organization.

Being labeled a mercenary wasn't what I pictured my superpowered career looking like, but considering the options in the Bay it certainly wasn't the worst. Forced recruitment without my preparations would be a lot scarier coming from Nazis or drug addicts, and if it was Lung I'd probably just plain get murdered. My other great fear, teen drama, hopefully doesn't exist when Spitfire's probably the only one my age and we don't have to go on those awkward school visits Wards are always doing.

Imagine my surprise, after waiting and thinking over every little thing and coming to grips with the fact that I would be forced to join their team for what might end up being my entire life, when the strange humanish centipede ended up just being a strange humanish centipede, almost on fire.

Green, and as small as a dog, this caterpillar cape was swinging from tree to tree like his life depended on it, which it very well might have with the fire licking at his antenna. His eyes seemed to widen with relief and maybe familiarity as he saw the grove I was in and began swinging my way. I was fairly well covered, so the caterpillar either knew where I was and was coming for me or knew the grove was safe from experience. Either way, his arrival seemed to be a sign I was safe enough for now, and I sat down and recalled the last of the bugs I had outside. The mites were searching for rivers or some sort of fissure that fire wouldn't be able to jump, but whatever effect was trapping me easily extended past my range.

There was no way the creature in front of me should be alive. Mr. Gladly, trying to be cool, once went on about how "capes were bullshit" in September, and it was generally accepted and recited online, but having a weirdly deep sense of the great wrong-ness of the doggerpillar and seeing it still function like I deeply, intrinsically knew that it shouldn't was a new level of bullshit.

It panted like it's phantom lungs were straining, its upper thorax rising and falling as if there was something there; the bulk of the body dedicated to either producing string, firing string, or applying chemicals to the string. Inside, there was no true "void" I could not see, I understood the ins and outs of this thing and that it was simply moving as if it controlled every piece of its body. No muscles pulled the tiny legs, and those legs certainly didn't pull the body, but the creature decided to move and its body moved, piece by piece, in the direction it wanted to go. Getting to see this disconnect up close gave me a slight grasp on it, but I honestly couldn't understand this bug cape's biology- that was, until it spoke to me.

"Par-don, hu-mon," it exhaled in a nervous, masculine voice, rhyming the words as if heavily accented, "Could I stay here for the Mera-mon's attack?"

While clearly exhausted, there was a sense of familiarity I got from this cape's voice that this might not be the first time he clashed with these 'Meraman' capes. The fact that the group had a name attached, a name which was in no way indicative of Faultline, dashed my hopes of the group being nonlethal and controlled. Something deep in my gut told me that this group wasn't one I would want to be forcibly recruited into. Japan may have been basically in tatters, and the language was quite simply dying, but when your city is partially dominated by a half-Japanese Fire Spewing Dragon's gang, the sound of burning practically acts as a battle cry. The only thing even rivalling the amount of mera's on Winslow's heating units was probably the swastikas, but this familiarity clued me in that whatever gang was burning this forest was possibly not recruiting people like me for their parahuman abilities. The problem was that I had nothing to counter a hostile pyrokinetic. I really, really was wishing that it would end up just being Faultline in disguise, but my bad luck stuck me in a burning forest with a monstrous cape I knew nothing about with seemingly no hope for rescue.

Brockton had no jungles like this, and the vegetation and insects, if you could call them that, were much too strange and alien to have gone unnoticed. I was definitely far from home, and I couldn't have been gone long enough for anyone to notice I was gone. Ha! Today was the first day in weeks I tried to go to Winslow for a full day. Between researching capes in the library and getting supplies, there were plenty of ways to distract myself while physically avoiding the Trio, and the school never tried to act on any of the phone calls they left on our voicemail. My dad would go ballistic at school for letting me fall off the grid for so long, but even then I can't think of a reason they would jump to Cape involvement.

I was screwed. Plain and simple, hopefully not literally.

I had maybe a fifth of a pound of bugs, most of which had mildly annoying bites at best, unless one was carrying diseases I didn't know about.

Mystery Bug Cape seemed to be young, at most my age, but either way he (I was fairly certain it was a he) had the bare minimum confidence in his abilities. Given how he was shaking in place, he assumed I would win in a fight despite the fact I had no costume, obvious brute power, or anything really beyond a backpack and unusual lankiness.

Huh. My imagination sparked when I first took in the situation, and now with more information it must have run off again. I never responded to the doggerpillar and I think my spacing out was scaring him. While I couldn't trust it, for the immediate future we would be stuck together so it would be better if he wasn't petrified of me. Scaring people probably wouldn't help me once I became a rogue.

Halfway between a wave and my best "PR-smile" as PHO would put it, I realized I had no idea how to introduce myself to the worm. His nervous chittering started to die down, so he must have realized I meant no harm, but, if I had to give a name, what should I say? He clearly expected me to be a cape regardless of my lack of costume, otherwise he wouldn't be so afraid of an obviously unarmed teenager, so could any more harm come from just giving him my name? Since this wasn't Brockton if some "Mera-man" was able to operate so conspicuously, my first name held basically no meaning while trying to give what might be my eventual cape name would both allow this cape to track me down to Brockton if I got a wiki page and reveal the nature of my powers just a little bit.

"Nice to meet you, I'm Taylor."

His mandibles finally stopped clicking together as he composed himself.

"H-hi Ms. Taylor, my name is W-wormmon. If it isn't rude," the now named Worm-man continued, "how did you get into the Digital World? I thought the gate was closed."

A lot to unpack there, but I wasn't cutting off the conversation again just to think. Worm-man was offering information, I would gladly take it.

"No idea. I clicked a link and then the world exploded."

"Yes, but that hasn't worked in years. There was an attack on the World Code and we lost both our catalysts and our gates to the Human World."

He said human normal enough, but every other time he tried to say man he ended up saying mon.

"What exactly do you mean by 'digital world'? And what's with the human/hu-mon thing?"

His nerves seemed to remember they existed, as his forehead began to glimmer. He really didn't have anything to suggest he could sweat, but the droplets on his brow begged to differ.

"Did the hu-mon's forget us? I suppose it must have been hundreds of years…" he trailed off before continuing, "just like the Human World is home to the Human monsters, hu-mons for short, the Digital World is home to the Digital Monster, Digimon."

"So how did you get between worlds before computers? The internet is barely older than the first parahumans."

"Uh, um, I'm just a small Wormmon, I don't know all the sciency things… no one ever really taught me before..."

Ah. He was on the verge of tears, and had surprising nice eyes. I mean that literally, his sight seemed to have some logic and instinct behind it, and in the future I might be able to try and see what they're reading. Whatever strange place this was clearly had made him paranoid, but he still struck me as childlike. He was speaking clearer now, despite his tears, and his voice was like a less grating version of grade school Greg Veder's voice, definitely male but not quite grown.

"Its okay." I sat down, done with grilling the stressed little thing. Afraid, confused, alone, I understood those things, especially now. I was a little embarrassed for not picking up on it sooner, because I was relatively tall and wearing… not the most inviting of clothes right now with my baggy brown hoodie making my lanky frame wider. "Do you need a friend Wormmon?"

You would have thought I gave the thing a cookie. Releasing his tension like a dam breaking, he climbed onto me and broke down crying. I relaxed myself, despite the fact there was a hostile cape nearing if the fires were any indication. Our cove seemed safe for now though, while the mite I sent out to scout burned it confirmed the fire wasn't able to pass the metal trees. Today was going to be only more stressful from here; this was probably the only calm before the storm I would get. My new little cape friend Wormmon and I sat down and got to know each other better. A bug after my own heart, he produced teabags from somewhere, and I had a water bottle I was supposed to drink for lunch in my backpack. Our plans were foiled when we realized we had no container to boil the water in nor did we want to approach the uncontrolled wildfire, but for the first time in years I think I found a friend.

It felt like my back pocket got a little heavier, but that was a later problem.


	3. Digiegg 1-3

**Digiegg 1.3**

* * *

Anxiety, my old friend, crept itself back into my mind as our pleasant conversation turned serious.

Wormmon had luckily _heard_ of the thing burning the forest down, but still had no idea how to stop it.

Meramon was something of a guardian of the forest, as much of a guardian a sentient humanoid flame monster can be. Concerningly, it had lived in the clearly very flammable forest for years with none of the smaller creatures ever questioning it before, suddenly, going on a mad rampage today.

Wormmon described Meramon as "something of a strong champion level", which I didn't understand much beyond the fact that his Breaker Blaster package could laugh in the face of the most common ways of attack. Obviously, Meramon was immune to regular fire, and his "physical form" was minimal even discounting the fact that any incoming materials were likely to be incinerated without even touching him. For Wormmon to not immediately recognize Meramon as strong was chilling, because, from the description I got, Meramon might very well be immune to Lung. Plus, since Digimon were clearly as bullshit on principle as capes were, Meramon just lived his life as a seemingly-invincible ball of fire.

Again, luckily, Wormmon claimed only one Meramon lived in the forest. If the concept of Digimon wasn't already bullshit enough, multiple Digimon could be in the same species and have the same exact powerset. I was growing more aware of how insane even Wormmon was, and nothing was stopping a band of them from grouping together. Just the fact they were capable of producing silkworm thread incredibly wide and rapidly was an incredible ability.

It approached.

I had pulled my mites inwards a while ago, but I didn't need my bugs to tell that it was getting significantly hotter in our little cove. Whether Wormmon was just very nervous too or had a lower heat tolerance than I did, he had been sweating for a while. My previously comfortable sweatshirt became suffocating so I wrapped it around my waist.

"Wormmon," I tensed as the heat increased, "we have to run."

"I know."

It made sense that Wormmon would understand just how outclassed we were. The only reasons we hadn't taken off already were that everything was on fire and the only batch of phantom trees was in the direction of Meramon.

Wormmon pulled on my pant leg to keep my attention.

"Taylor, I, uh, could get us to the treetops…"

Bullshit. No logical way the silk he could make could ever pull that much weight to the top. No way something so small could produce enough silk to reach the top.

Of course, this was just the kind of bullshit I was sure would work.

I had disregarded my power's frankly inane judgement on how much silk Wormmon could make, but I was slowly adapting to how Wormmon's pseudobiology worked and this was precisely the kind of cape bullshit in our favor.

Wormmon began to fire enough ropes of silk to outfit an old ship, pulling himself up to branches before firing more silk to pull me up. We continued up and up, making it almost to the canopy when a sharp updraft hit me in the leg.

Meramon was surprisingly dim for a walking fireball. I would have thought the fire would be so bright that it would look like a vaguely human blot of fire, but rather it was easy to look at and clearly recognizable as human-like. Even from a distance, its "eyes" and "mouth" were both clearly recognizable. Its heat tangibly beat upwards despite that same distance though. I held my breath. Unless he had some way of sensing me, there were no jarring colors that would give me away. After all, I was in brown and black and Wormmon was dark green. We could have just been part of the branch. But...

It stopped.

Motionless.

A pin could have dropped.

Explosively crackling, Meramon snapped its body around while firing a stream of fire at the base of a tree. It spun, spreading smaller fires all around. Almost primal in nature, blind fury led to a massive fireball shooting in every direction.

With an oddly feminine shout of "Magma Bomb!", it, or should I say she, launched something like a mortar shell upwards. The fire itself didn't harm our tree, nor could it reach us, but I some of the shrapnel must have. Pain vaguely danced up my forearms as Wormmon winced, blinking rapidly.

Holding your breath did not work like those Young Adult Novels made it seem like it did. My concentration broke just a little from the pain, and all the sudden I was gasping for air. The heat only made it harder to breathe… I sacrificed some mites and had the more valuable insects take shelter in the wayward water droplets of my basically empty bottle. Wormmon wasn't holding up as well as I would have hoped either, if this came down to a waiting game, we would suffer a casualty much before Meramon left.

"I can smell you, hu-mon."

Practically a growl rose out of her throat as a wave of intense heat also hit me.

Something had to be done. The problem was with what? My opponent knew the terrain better, vastly better, and all the fire she threw around made it so there was nowhere to run or hide. Her range was decent enough that if I had a way to hurt her, which I didn't, there was no way I would be able to get close. Insects and silk, including Wormmon's, couldn't hope to make an impact. The flames licked at the not-trees but didn't burn them, so dropping a branch was an idea, but I lacked any way to break an unnaturally strong branch right now.

Meramon grumbled unintelligibly to herself below me. Seeming to walk away at first, she pivoted and kicked the trunk of the nearest tree in a huff before beginning to pace around the grove.

From through the treeline, I could vaguely make out someone running toward our location. Somehow they were warding off the flames, making steady progress all the while. I stood no chance with all the fire around, and Wormmon was similarly useless, but whoever this person was seemed capable of at least extinguishing some of it.

They approached, and it was definitely a duo now, a girl and a small little ball thing, and I lost sight as they came within a tree length of the grove.

I learned a long time ago not to rely on other people, and here I was, desperately wishing for them to save me.

If they knew me, would they still come? She seemed confident, but when she saw Meramon, would they run? They surely must have felt the heat by now, plus the very real danger practically hanging in the air.

There was no way they could see me, sure, but still, someone was coming to help Taylor Hebert.

I honestly had lost faith that anyone would ever help me like this again.

Something must be seriously fucking wrong with this world, for me to make a friend and get lucky in the course of an hour. It felt like a day, not just an hour, but this morning I showed up to Winslow and disappeared, and here I was, being saved while trapped in a tree.

They arrived with a shout, too quiet to be parsible.

Meramon meanwhile flinched backwards as it seemed a bucket of water was thrown at her. Into the grove ran a small green and orange sphere, followed closely by a girl who might have been my age. The girl seemed human, so unless these digimon had some sort of stranger ability to disguise as humans, I wasn't alone here. Meramon began to recover, but a shining light bore out from the new duo.  
"He's digivolving…", Wormmon muttered from on top of my head.

Wormmon vaguely mentioned digivolution while we were talking earlier, but it sounded like a coming of age, a gradual change. He compared himself to being childlike, undergoing metamorphosis, and becoming an adult. For most caterpillars, that was a month long endeavor.

For whatever this thing was, it took all of 3 seconds.

Leaping from the shine came a metallic fish digimon, screaming "Variable Darts" before launching a burst of water-knives. I couldn't make out too much detail from my height, but the fish definitely didn't lack any luster. It didn't move particularly fast or gracefully, but it was able to shoot multiple water-based projectiles and effectively shut down the enemy pyrokineticist.

I couldn't parse the reasoning behind them calling out attacks. Every attack had a name, and they insisted on repeating them over and over. It was clear the name wasn't crucial to them, multiple rounds of fireballs went perfectly unannounced. If I heard the fish scream "Water Brick" one more time...

Wormmon and I decided to risk beginning our descent. The silk still hung from the branch, just bundled up, so, making sure Wormmon wasn't passed out, I began to rappel our way down the trunk.

"Variable Darts!"

Ah. Instead of water knives, like what happened every other volley between Meramon and the fish, this time the fish just sliced Meramon across the chest with his massive claws. All of the calling out had conditioned Meramon to countering with his "Magma Fish" attack, but his Blaster ability took time to charge. The new two took advantage of the gap and went for the kill. Meramon staggered backwards from the hit, indeed, and then began to disintegrate as he died.

As the last of Meramon's corpse disappeared, I was close enough to the ground to speak normally. My plan was to play up the "Taylor Hebert is not a cape no-siree" angle strongly here.

"Hey," I called out, "thank you for saving me. My name is Taylor."

The girl appeared to be around my age, not nearly as tall as I was but considerably more fit. Built more like a farmer than an athlete, she wore light reddish clothing in contrast with her dark hair and complexion. As she began to speak, she punched her words with an obviously foreign accent, but I couldn't quite pin down where it was from.

"Hello Taylor, I'm Mori, and this," she gestured with a device in her hand to the fish as the fish glowed and… morphed back? As it transformed into what was the round looking fish monster from before, she finished her statement, "is my partner, Betamon."

"And I would be-ow!"

Betamon energetically fit his mouth on Wormmon's head, much to Wormmon's displeasure. Abashedly, Wormmon managed a trailing, "I, am, umm, Wormmon."

Mori smiled and waved at him politely before turning to me. "Did you just land? You don't seem well acquainted with the digital world."

"Yes, I just got here before the fire started. It's a far cry from the city…" I trailed off, not knowing what else to say.

Her ears perked up as I ended.  
"You come from a city? I've never seen one."

"I'm from Brockton Bay, it's on the coast of Massachusetts."

"Massachusetts? Is that near New York?"

For our intents and purposes, it was close enough. I didn't really want to keep the topic of conversation on myself when there were so many questions I had about my newfound acquaintances. Firstly I was suspicious of them, if only because Mori was the first human I've seen in… I guess it was only two hours. Still, it reeked of all kinds of improbability that someone would run into the burning forest, fight the fire monster, and then not flinch at all when a total stranger and foreigner climbed down from a tree. Secondly, I was curious, if only because of their confidence in a totally alien situation. Mori made it seem like she had been with Betamon for a while, and her unfamiliarity with the states connoted that she was probably from a ways away.

"Yes, it's a bit north of there. How about you? What brought you here?"

Surprisingly, it wasn't Mori who spoke first. I took Betamon for somewhat of a dunce at first, but he stopped gnawing on Wormmon's head briefly to explain.

"We're hunting for more," pausing to nibble more, "Gate Pieces. If we can find enough digivices we should," an increasingly uncomfortable Wormmon flinched as Betamon bit hard and fast, "be able to open a gate to the Human World. Mori can track the Firewall Digimon who in turn track the hu-mons with digivices and their partners."

"Digivice?"

My question got an answer as Mori held out the small, roughly cross-shaped piece of obvious Tinkertech.

"This, it works to register and track partners and do a myriad of other things. If Meramon was able to track you, then you probably have one."

I feel like I would have recognized a piece of Tinkertech suddenly on my person, even if it was that small.

"I think it was coincidence; we got penned in by the fire and Meramon knew Wormmon escaped from him earlier. Where did you say you were from?"

I tried to turn the dial back on the other two, if only to have to share less. Wormmon shifted in position without an accompanying chomp from Betamon, almost as if he had something to add. Since I didn't sense he was comfortable saying it, I gestured him to hold it and waited for a response.

"Oh, I'm from a small town in Ghana," Mori offered, "nowhere significant. We got run over by the Ash Beast once, but other than that we lack anything the warlords want other than land, food. Living is living though, and home is home. I'll get back there as soon as I can."

I suppose that would explain why she hadn't seen a city. World Issues, back when I had tried paying attention, had a chapter on Africa's warlord dynamics, and, while fairly vague, the warlords generally were known to be quite paranoid and authoritarian. One does not simply visit a city without paying for safety in some way, most of which involve sacrifice or conscription, so not ever seeing one as a small farmer made enough sense.

"Well, Taylor, Wormmon, would you like to travel with us? I know we want to return different places, but there's safety in numbers."

One of us would die if there was any teen drama. I didn't have any water left though, and Meramon proved that there were some threats I would need a team to deal with. Maybe this would serve as good experience for when I went out in costume back in Brockton actually now that I thought about it. Working with Digimon, each basically a parahuman in their own right, and fighting my way back home wasn't too far off from heroics. I took a knee and addressed Wormmon directly

"Wormmon, would you come with us?"

"Of course."

We shared a mutual nod before turning to Mori. Betamon even stopped chewing on Wormmon, opting to gnaw on Mori's ankle instead.

"Let's go together."

As they turned around and Wormmon made his way to sit on my head, I began to let my fliers back out of my backpack, fanning out to restore my bug sense. Knowing my backpack was hot and stuffy somehow really didn't help me, so they set out to locate food and water for themselves and us. It felt like I reopened my eyes as we set off after our new traveling companions.

* * *

 _AN: Down to business, yes, I know Meramon is quoted as saying Magma Fish. That was a typo of "Magma Fist", but my bad sense of humor, combined with the fact she was fighting a fish, made me keep it. Also, I'm not a huge fan of big OC's, but I needed one. Just one though, and you'll understand why eventually. If this chapter felt a little forced, ooc, or just generically rushed, please comment where. I felt it was a little shaky, but I want to get to the **main villain** times for the arc or at least a presentable time for an interlude so I can hint what happened to literally the rest of the world sans Taylor, or at least an interesting part of it. All comments or reviews are appreciated and read._


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